Friday, December 4, 2015

Never Miss An Opportunity To Harass A Physician

Despite some PR releases to the contrary, pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) continue to harass physicians and waste their time. My latest inane conversation occurred after a pharmacy left their usual message about prior authorization and an 800 number about a prescription that I had written. Unless I call the PBM and jump through all of the necessary hoops they will not cover my patient's prescription and it will likely go unfilled. It was a newer medication and more importantly one that I had not started in the first place. In other words, the patient had been maintained on this medication before seeing me. That means the specific prescription had been approved from another physician a few months earlier. I was writing this prescription because the patient did not have access to the previous pharmacy and I was the physician of record in another treatment facility. The conversation with the PBM went like this:

PBM: "Is this a doctor's office or a pharmacy?"
Me: "Doctor".
PBM: "Who is the doctor?"
Me: "George Dawson"
PBM: "Who are you?"
Me: "George Dawson"
PBM: "OK - I was just checking. What is your fax number? I can fax you the form in 20 minutes"
Me: (fax number given)
PBM: "OK - you will need to complete the form and then fax it back to us and we will have 15 days to make a determination?"
Me: "Do you understand that the patient needed this medication two days ago and I just got a notification about this today?"
PBM: "That is the patient's policy. We can do an expedited review and give you a determination in 3 days if you like? But that is in the patient's policy. We have either 15 days or 3 days to make a determination. Do you have any questions about that?"
Me: "Well no I do not. I am only concerned about appropriate medical care and this delay is not appropriate medical care. I don't care about your policies. Your policies have nothing to do with appropriate medical care."
PBM: "Is there anything else that I can do for you today?"
Me: "No there is not."

I expected to receive the fax in 20 minutes but did not get it until the next day. The form is designed to waste additional physician time. It could have been pre-populated with all of my information and the patients information - but it was not and I had to complete the form by hand. There were two sections on the form that had to do with failed medication trials. One wanted specific dates. Since I am a consultant I do not have specific dates and my experience with most patients is that they have a difficult enough time with the names of medications. I do know that the patient had tried 8 different medications from the same class and stopped them due to lack of efficacy or intolerable side effects. I added them to the section and wrote "refer to the previous section" on the redundant form. Total time to complete the form and try to figure out what they wanted was 20 minutes. I was seeing other patients it took me an additional 2 1/2 hours to complete the form and fax it. The 72 hour clock started at that point but there was no place on the form to request an "expedited review".

I have several posts about PBMs on this blog. They all have the same modus operandi. PBMs are at the very minimum a significant delaying action. They are hoping that the physician, the patient, or both just give up and either withdraw the prescription or opt for a much cheaper generic prescription. There are a couple of significant problems with that theory. The first is that all generics in the same so-called drug class are not equivalent. Any physician with a modicum of experience knows that individual patients have highly individualized responses to medications that are broadly similar and that there are generally sound pharmacological reasons for those responses. Secondly, physicians have been prescribing less expensive generics medications for decades now and if a new unique medication is being prescribed the odds are very high that the person has not responded to that medication. In the example given here, I had a list of 8 medications in my record that failed due to intolerable side effects or a lack of efficacy. They were all inexpensive generics. I listed them on the form and faxed it back to them.

This behavior does highlight an important difference in ethics between physicians and medical businesses. In every case where I prescribe a medication for a patient, the medication is carefully selected and monitored for how well it is tolerated and the effectiveness. The ethical concept here for physicians is to provide continuity of care for the patient. That is the reason that I am obligated to provide follow up prescriptions to patients who leave one care setting and go to another. The PBM obviously has no similar constraint. I would argue that their 15 or even 3 day policy ignores the fact that the patient needs the medication right now. The telephone conversation makes it explicit - the company cares more about the policy than the patient who needs the medication.

The political process in all of this is frequently ignored. How is it possible for a private company to waste so much physician time and interfere with patient care? A long time ago the healthcare industry and its friends in government sold the American public on the idea that businesses should ration health care. They sold that idea with rhetoric about how physicians were greedy and tended to squander health care dollars on unnecessary tests, surgical procedures and medicines. They sold that idea in spite of the fact that the largest independent review organization of physicians documented a trivial amount of excessive resource use. Businesses are now firmly entrenched as middle men whose only job is to ration health care and that includes prescription medications. They do that in part by having physicians make tens of thousands of calls like the one outlined here every day and essentially leaving that physician and their patient in the lurch.

Health care businesses currently have the best of all possible worlds. They are funded by mandatory health care insurance that is essentially the second largest tax on all Americans. The annual health care premiums easily exceed property taxes, state income taxes, and state sales taxes for almost all Americans. The does not include the amount of physician and patient time that is wasted by these rationing tactics. In return Americans get a system of corporate management that consistently places the interests of the corporation and corporate profits ahead of them. They talk like they are competitive businesses - but they are in fact some of the most heavily subsidized businesses in the US and nobody seems to make the connection between the most expensive health care system in the world and this corporate welfare.

It is well past the time for change and the first step should be to return medical decision making to physicians and stop pretending that a for-profit company cares more about patients than the monied interests of the corporation.

2 comments:

I think our best course is to sic the patient on the company any way we can, as well as sound like your going to make them regret giving you trouble. If it's an employe- based health plan, tell the patient to complain to human resources. Tell the patient exactly what happened with their medication, and if they still want you to spend time filling out what are clearly nuisance forms - and show the form to the patient - they will unfortunately be charged for the time it takes you, as their insurance company will not pay for it, and you do not work for free. Let the "managers" know that you're going to advise your patient both to complain to HR and to call them - warn them that the patient may be, shall we say, difficult to deal with. If the patient suffers any harm, such as withdrawal, because the company did not approve the medicine in time, you will be happy to testify for the patient should any sort of lawsuit becomes an issue. Sound angry like you're about to make a huge stink. Usually the more you sound like someone they don't want to mess with, the more likely they will back down and get off your back. If they threaten to kick you off of their panel, give them permission to do whatever they need to do.

Thanks for your comment David. I think at this point the systems are so entrenched that individual patients will not have much luck. If a large number of employees in a large organization complain they might have better luck. What I see is a broad movement to very high deductible policies. At first it looked like there might be some premium savings but now the premiums are increasing. There seems to be little competition among plans and the complexity is used to obfuscate apparent value. It is a full time job for any consumer or physician to make sense of pharmacy benefits.

Managed care systems also have much more leverage these days that most physician are employees. Somewhere in that contract they are obligated to jump through all of these hoops as a condition of employment - while maintaining their productivity of course.